Topic: george f. will
Will: Court can undo confusion about this WWI memorial
For decades the Supreme Court has entangled itself in Establishment Clause decisions that have been, in the words of Alice in Wonderland, curiouser and curiouser. On Wednesday, it can leaven with clarity the confusion it has sown.
Will: Reality continues to leak from American life
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, averse to government by arrested-development teenagers, dismissed the Green New Deal (GND) as a “suggestion.” Its enthusiasts, buffeted by gales of derision, responded with gusts of dissembling as implausible as the GND: Their fact sheet was a mere draft, or a dirty trick (“doctored”), or something.
Will: Limited government requires limited president
Soon, in a federal court that few Americans know exists, there will come a ruling on a constitutional principle that today barely exists but that could, if the judicial branch will resuscitate it, begin to rectify the imbalance between the legislative and executive branches.
Will: Klobuchar could be 2020 contender for Democrats
Klobuchar, who will be 59 in May, is the daughter of a newspaper columnist. Surmounting this handicap, she went to Yale, then to the University of Chicago Law School, then to a law firm.
Will: Why do people like Lindsey Graham come to Congress?
During the government shutdown, Graham’s tergiversations – sorry, this is the precise word – have amazed.
Will: Brexit shows the dangers of direct democracy
European unification was conceived in fear – Europeans’ fear of themselves, a residue of wars produced by various atavisms, including unhinged nationalism.
Will: The Supreme Court jumps to unanimity on frog case
Unanimity is elusive in today’s America but the Supreme Court achieved it last week. Although the dusky gopher frog is endangered, so are property rights and accountable governance.
Will: Lucrative law enforcement will become lawless
Justices who fancy themselves “originalists” should acknowledge that those who wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights understood that courts were going to have to give content to the concept of excessiveness (as well as to cruelty and unusualness in punishments, and unreasonableness regarding searches and seizures, and other open-textured constitutional language).
Will: This Thanksgiving, ample servings of amusement
North Carolina had second thoughts about the 12-count criminal indictment against Tammie Hedges for practicing veterinary medicine without a license when, during Hurricane Florence, she offered shelter and first aid to pets left behind by their evacuating owners.
Presidential candidate tests Democrats’ values
The world’s oldest political party has developed an aversion to discretion.
Will: Harvard’s problem is a version of America’s
Harvard’s problem today is a version of America’s, the tension between two problematic approaches to providing opportunities – “meritocracy” that is clearly but too simply quantified, and a less tidy but more nuanced measurement of the mixture of merits that serves a university’s, and society’s, several purposes.
Will: The madness of college basketball extends beyond March
George F. Will
WASHINGTON – Until last week it seemed that the Division 1 college basketball industry could produce nothing more risible than its pieties...
Will: Missouri’s Hawley is an actual conservative
Hawley can be part of the GOP’s intelligent future, if it chooses to have one.
Will: Arizona voters can save their judiciary from politics
To their credit, Arizonans have never exercised their power to remove a justice of the state’s Supreme Court.
Will: An unsparing look at the Vietnam War’s mendacities
A history book can be a historic act if, by modifying a nation’s understanding of its past, it alters future behavior.
Will: America’s disturbing plunge into protectionism
Tariffs are taxes collected at the border and paid in one way or another by various residents of the importing nation.
Will: The Supreme Court confirmation process has become a maelstrom of insincerities
This debacle du jour dramatizes how the court’s stature is hostage to the degrading confirmation process ...
Will: Fear-based parenting
Because of the belief in “parental determinism,” mothers, especially, are susceptible to the fear that something seemingly minor that is done or left undone will impede Suzy’s path to Princeton and Congress.
Will: In Texas, a template for victory in 2020
A Fletcher victory might be an early tremor of a political earthquake.
Will: The college campus’s cult of fragility
Students encouraged to feel fragile will learn to recoil from “microaggressions” so micro that few can discern them.
Will: Mississippi election tells an American story
The odds are somewhat, but only somewhat, against Espy, so the possibility of victory is not an illusion.
Will: Questions for Kavanaugh
The 1978 Bakke case involving racial preferences in admissions said that race can be a “plus” factor for certain government-preferred minorities. Are there constitutional principles controlling decisions about which groups are to be preferred and about tailoring preferences?
Will: US is overdue for another Lehman-like episode
The president’s Office of Management and Budget – not that there is a meaningful budget getting actual management – projects that the deficit for fiscal 2019, which begins in six weeks, will be $1.085 trillion. This is while the economy is, according to the economic historian in the Oval Office, “as good as it’s ever been, ever.”
Will: Book underlines axiom that if you want peace, prepare for war
Today’s U.S. ships are more capable than ever, but too few for comfort, as Lehman’s readers will realize when they consider what only the Navy can do.
Will: The future’s constituency is the conscience of the present
Because it is politically expedient to sacrifice the future, which does not vote, to the consumption of government services by those who do, America is eating its seed corn.
Will: A California election could catalyze K-12 improvements – and perhaps end the state’s...
Because about two of California’s 277,000 teachers (0.0007 percent) are dismissed each year for unsatisfactory performance, school districts resort to what is called “the dance of the lemons,” shuffling incompetent teachers from one school to another.
Will: Protectionism proves that evidence is unpersuasive
If you are not collateral damage in the escalating trade wars, the bulletins from the wars’ multiplying fronts are hilarious reading
Will: Will New Jersey send a Republican to the Senate?
The Republicans’ most recent presidential victory in New Jersey was in 1988. In the subsequent seven elections, the Democratic presidential candidates’ average margin of victory was almost 13 points. This state last elected a Republican senator (Clifford Case) in 1972. This 46-year drought might end in November.
Will: What might a socialist American government do?
Socialism requires – actually, socialism is – industrial policy, whereby government picks winners and losers in conformity with the government’s vision of how the future ought to be rationally planned.
Restoring workers’ First Amendment freedoms
There is no sugarcoating today’s reality. Public sector unions are conveyor belts that move a portion of government employees’ salaries – some of the amount paid in union dues – into political campaigns, almost always Democrats’, to elect the people with whom the unions “negotiate” for taxpayers’ money.
Will: Can Bill Weld restore conservatism?
Because of its 2016 efforts, the Libertarian Party will automatically be on 39 states’ ballots this fall and has a sufficient infantry of volunteers to secure ballot access in another nine.
Will: ERA began as a farce but has ended in tragedy
Karl Marx was no more mistaken than usual when he said that historic people and events appear twice, first as tragedy, then as farce.
Will: The accidental president who wore power lightly
Within 17 days in the autumn of 1975 – first in Sacramento, then in San Francisco – two separate handgun-wielding women attempted to assassinate the president.
Will: Prohibition has been lifted at last on sports wagering
Illegal sports betting was estimated to involve only $25 billion annually when PASPA was passed. Its subsequent burgeoning is redundant evidence that restraining a popular appetite with a statute is akin to lassoing a locomotive with a cobweb, which should chasten busybody governments.
Will: Battling campus oppression of freedom of expression
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) says bias response teams produce “a surveillance state on campus where students and faculty must guard their every utterance for fear of being reported to and investigated” by bureaucrats.
Will: After nixing the Iran nuclear deal, is containment our only option?
It is a law of arms control: Significant agreements are impossible until they are unimportant, which means until they are not significant.
Will: Is the US trapped in a debt spiral?
The Congressional Budget Office projects that new federal borrowing over the next 10 years will total $12.4 trillion and that at the end of 2028, the debt will be $28.7 trillion – 96 percent of GDP, up from 39 percent in 2008.
Will: Gowdy is closing the circle of South Carolina’s history
As a member of three key committees (Oversight and Government Reform, Judiciary, and Intelligence), Gowdy has been at the – sometimes he has been the – epicenter of controversies.
Will: A showcase of the vilest and noblest manifestations of humanity
Nothing is unthinkable, and political institutions by themselves provide no permanent safety from barbarism, which permanently lurks beneath civilization’s thin, brittle crust.
Will: Striking a blow against the administrative state
Last week, one week after the first anniversary of Neil Gorsuch’s ascension to the Supreme Court, he delivered an opinion that was excellent as it pertained to the case at issue and momentous in its implications pertaining to the institutional tangle known as the administrative state.
Will: South Dakota asks Supreme Court to circumvent Congress, and the market
South Dakota’s impertinent law reflects this fact: Governments often are reflexively reactionary when new technologies discomfort established interests with which the political class has comfortable relations of mutual support.
Will: What interest is served by disenfranchising felons?
What compelling government interest is served by felon disenfranchisement? Enhanced public safety? How? Is it to fine-tune the quality of the electorate?
Will: Making government less larcenous
Law enforcement agencies get to keep the profits from forfeited property, which gives them an incentive to do what too many of them do – abuse the process.
Will: Who will pay for paid family leave?
The recent bipartisan budget agreement, which indicates that 10-digit deficits are acceptable to both parties even when the economy is robust, indicates government’s future.
Will: Bolton’s beliefs are a recipe for diplomatic delusions
Bolton’s belief in the U.S. power to make the world behave and eat its broccoli reflects what has been called “narcissistic policy disorder” – the belief that whatever happens in the world happens because of something the United States did or did not do.
Will: Freedom of speech includes the right to remain silent
Governments routinely behave badly, but sometimes their mean-spiritedness comes to the Supreme Court’s attention.
Will: A war without an objective, 6,000 days in
It is conceivable, and conceivably desirable, that U.S. forces will be in Afghanistan, lending intelligence, logistical and even lethal support to that nation’s military and security forces for another 1,000, perhaps 6,000, days.
Will: Keystone State race could set template for Democrats
If Lamb wins, Democrats will have found a template for many districts in 2018: candidates who seem ideologically unlike the national party and temperamentally unlike the president.
Will: Don’t tread on this US voter’s T-shirt
Today more than ever, with freedom of expression increasingly threatened, an American’s default position regarding restrictions should be: Don’t tread on me.
Will: Infrastructure spending will not transform America
Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Long’s Louisiana career, with a rolling sentence about a road.
Will: Play ball, with informed intelligence
What fans most dislike, and what constitutes baseball malpractice, is consistent mediocrity – teams not talented enough to play in October but not bad enough to receive the right to draft the best young talent.
Will: Snakes on a plane for emotional support?
But the proliferation of emotional-support animals suggests that a cult of personal fragility is becoming an aspect of the quest for the coveted status of victim.
Will: Why good economic news is bad
All news is economic news, because everything affects the economy, or reveals attitudes or behaviors that soon will affect it. And all economic news is bad – especially good economic news, because it gives rise to bad behavior.
Will: Frederick Douglass, a champion of American individualism
Douglass opposed radical Republicans’ proposals to confiscate plantations and distribute the land to former slaves. Sandefur surmises that “Douglass was too well versed in the history and theory of freedom not to know” the importance of property rights.
Will: Protectionism ensures no bad deed goes unrewarded
Fomenting spurious anxieties about national security is the first refuge of rent-seeking scoundrels who tart up their protectionism as patriotism when they inveigle government into lining their pockets with money extracted from their fellow citizens.
Will: Some policy dentistry could combat truth decay
The volume and velocity of the information flow, combined with the new ability to curate a la carte information menus, erode society’s assumption of a shared set of facts.
Will: A new paean to progressivism overlooks why Americans lost trust in government
Has no liberal noticed that no government is ever neutral in society’s allocation of wealth and opportunity?
Will: In Oregon, progressivism spills over at the pump
Still, 2018 will be the year of living dangerously in the state that was settled by people who trekked there on the Oregon Trail, through the territory of Native Americans hostile to Manifest Destiny.
Will: How merit-based college admissions became so unfair
A meritocratic assignment of opportunity by impersonal processes and measurements might seem democratic but it can feel ruthless, and can be embittering.
Will: US needs balanced-budget amendment more than ever
No one knows at what percentage the debt’s deleterious effect on economic growth becomes severe; no sensible person doubts that there is such a point.
Will: We do not need government to remind us that smoking kills
The strange, meandering path of tobacco – a legal commodity that is harmful when used as intended – to the present began in contradictions.
Will: The survival of the shrillest
The many Americans who are happiest when unhappy seem as addicted to indignation as the fewer Americans are to cocaine
Will: How long will US Congress remain a bystander regarding war?
There is no reason to think that North Korea’s regime will relinquish weapons it deems essential to its single priority: survival.
Will: Republicans’ tax wager is worth the gamble
Economics is a science of incentives, and like all sciences it is never “settled.”
Will: College basketball season begins under odiferous clouds
There is no way gracefully – without unseemly accommodations – to graft onto universities an enormously lucrative entertainment industry.
Will: A nod, and noddingoff, to another year of American hilarity
Tryptophan, an amino acid in turkey, is unjustly blamed for what mere gluttony does, making Americans comatose every fourth Thursday in November. But before nodding off, give thanks for another year of American hilarity...
A disconcerting raid on university endowments
Great universities are great because philanthropic generations have borne the cost of sustaining private institutions that seed the nation with excellence. Donors have done this in the expectation that earnings accruing from their investments will be devoted solely to educational purposes, in perpetuity.
On tax reform, US Republicans are ‘defining victory down’
They should have made the case for large reforms that annoy democratically – almost everyone, simultaneously – but for a large purpose.
Will: The radiating mischief of protectionism
What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive ourselves into believing that corporate welfare can be seemly.
Will: U.S. engine is being slowed by complacency
For complacent Americans, a less dynamic, growth-oriented nation seems less like an alarming prospect than a soothing promise of restfulness.
Will: A hilarious and elementary lesson on the burdens of progressivism
Rosenfeld’s novel is a glimpse of how arduous life is for progressives, bowed as they are beneath the crushing weight of every choice’s immense social significance.
Will Congress be stirred from its slumber?
What Obama did was popular and unconstitutional. The latter attribute probably does not interest Obama’s successor, but the former attribute evidently does.
